End Results and Bonus

Good

• I love that it’s silent
• Apple Silicon is as good as I’d hoped — the bang-per-watt is great for my circumstances with solar power etc
• The annoyances with not knowing when it’s turned on are largely alleviated with my scripts, as long as I’m using it on my LAN (which, realistically I always am)

Bad

• MacOS, when I do have to use it (sorry Mac fans… I do prefer it to Windows)
• The battery does not hold power at all well when turned off (if I turn it off — yes off, not asleep — with a full battery, a few days later it’s completely dead and needs to be charged before I can turn it on)

I’m never going to use this as my main machine, and that was never my plan. I’m into minimal Linux with invisible tiling window managers like DWM, and dragging windows around, being forced to watch animations etc won’t cut it for my preferences.

I do know about Asaha Linux but that makes power usage much less special and I’m not sure how it plays with the development stack I need for Flutter. Maybe I’ll try it one day.

For me this was an investment into being able to responsibly build software for the Apple ecosystem and its users who have different preferences than mine. It’s a tool for a specific sub-set of tasks, and under those conditions it does what I need.

Bonus: E-ink Macbook

Remember I mentioned that I had a Boox Max Lumi which could function as a monitor for the Macbook? Here it is in full effect.

• Macbook using Boox Max Lumi as an E-ink display

After tweaking some settings in Accessibility/Display, MacOS can be made to look half-decent on e-ink.

All the usual caveats about e-ink apply re refresh rates and ghosting of course, but I could easily see myself working quite happily in Vim on it in some imaginary future dystopia where I’m trapped in Apple’s walled garden, all that exists, protected by a multi-trillion dollar Reality Distortion Field that they managed to power up just before the bombs dropped…